Prep Soccer: Pretzels dominate Sycamore in sectional semis

While the old adage says it’s hard to beat a team three times in one season, Freeport made it look easy Wednesday night. The Pretzels dominated the Spartans 8-1 in the semifinals of the Class 2A Freeport girls soccer sectional.

By Adam J. Kradle

Journal Standard

By Adam J. Kradle

Posted May. 23, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated May 23, 2013 at 10:04 PM

By Adam J. Kradle

Posted May. 23, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated May 23, 2013 at 10:04 PM

FREEPORT

While the old adage says it’s hard to beat a team three times in one season, Freeport made it look easy Wednesday night.

The Pretzels dominated the Spartans 8-1 in the semifinals of the Class 2A Freeport girls soccer sectional. The win puts the Pretzels (18-5) back in the sectional championship match for the fifth straight season. But for the first time, they’ll be playing it at home. The Pretzels will face Prairie Ridge, which beat Aurora Rosary 3-0 in the other semifinal.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had a Freeport team play for a sectional championship in Freeport,” coach Nick Namio said.. “We’re excited.”

“We can’t wait,” Freeport forward Haley Swords said. “This is the biggest crowd we’ve had and we hope there is even more on Friday. They’re just so supportive and we’re just happy to be playing here.”

The Pretzels have now swept Sycamore all three times they’ve met this season.

Darice Brooks, Julia Luecke and Swords scored first-half goals for the Pretzels, who led 3-1 at halftime after out-shooting Sycamore 13-3. The Pretzels would dominate even more in the second half.

“After Namio’s halftime speech it clicked in our heads that we needed to score so we could show Prairie Ridge that we’re a scoring team and they’re going to have to stop us from scoring if they want to get to where we want to go,” Brooks said.

Brooks scored Freeport’s first second-half goal less than four minutes in. Swords notched her second of the night with 18:40 remaining. Allyson Hayner (penalty kick), Nicole Carlson and Jasmine Tillman also found the net for Freeport, which out-shot the Spartans 23-4.

“Our energy was what created a lot of our opportunities,” Namio said. “We had a lot of energy and a lot of quickness and got to balls and put the balls in some real dangerous positions early and often so that we were able to stay on the attack the entire game.”

It was the eighth postseason meeting in the past nine years between the Pretzels and the Spartans, who have now met in the playoffs for five consecutive seasons. This one was easily the most lopsided of the matchups, however, as only one of the previous seven postseason battles was decided by more than one goal.

Having already seen Sycamore twice this season, winning 2-0 and 6-1, the Pretzels had a good idea of what to expect.

“The second game that we played them in our tournament they were tired so we didn’t expect to come out like that, but we did expect to do good and come out and try our hardest to win,” Swords said.

Page 2 of 2 - Freeport will try to make it back-to-back sectional titles when it faces Prairie Ridge at 7 p.m. on Friday. The winner will advance to Tuesday’s Barrington Supersectional.